Skin

Sandra Laing, the real-life figure at the center of Anthony Fabian’s social issue drama Skin, made international headlines with an unusual and achingly sad personal story, which Fabian uses as a testament to the emotional, psychological, and sociological fallout of apartheid. The child of white Afrikaner parents, Sandra (portrayed as an adult by Sophie Okonedo) was nevertheless born with brown skin, attributable to some unusual genetic quirk, and thus fell uneasily between the white and black communities of racially segregated South Africa. For Sandra, life became a tumultuous struggle over personal identity and a decades-long quest for belonging. And much of ...